honoree virtuousness: Business Engagement Through Social Media

Saturday, April 20, 2013

Business Engagement Through Social Media - Expand2Web

The relationship between social media marketing and small businesses has moved beyond infancy. You cannot measure?customer engagement and experience?by counting the amount of likes and tweets. Facebook and Twitter are valuable regarding interaction but not utilized to maximum capacity. By following these simple tips you can use social media to connect to your customers and build new relationships.

Engaging Content

Move beyond sending a Tweet or posting information on your Facebook business page to fully engaging with your customers. Create a dialogue. The information on your social media pages must be fresh and relevant. Create original, timely and engaging content and void repetitive content. Create information tailored to your customer base instead of a broad spectrum.

Keep the Conversations Going

Exposure is a key to growing your small business. Word of mouth may not generate business but with social media, you can create buzz around your business and brand. More than 80% of online marketing firms agree?social media engagement?is based upon social interaction between the customer and the business.

But don?t stop at your core customers. Instead, ?tap into the entire online community, moving beyond your customer base and into the greater audience of potential relationships. ?When you engage with these potential customers and your existing customers, you increase full engagement by 87 percent, according to a J.D. Power and Associate study.

What Worked?

Your business does not move forward unless you understand your prior faults. Look at your prior engagement year over year. What worked and what did not work?

Review your?social media metric tools?and engagement score. If you were not using a conversion tool, you need to start. Do not limit your activity to the major social media networks. To get the full picture, look at all of the social media platforms where you have a presence.

Setting Goals

After reviewing what worked in the past, set new goals. Every goal starts with the customer in mind. Look at your customer service levels. How did your business interact with the customer? How do you want to change in order to increase customer engagement?

Create a micro-niche tailored to a broader customer base. Continue to educate the customer regarding your brand and your business. Tie in the importance of the customers as it relates to the success of the business.

Engagement

Creating a social media marketing strategy is more than just creating a Facebook page or a Twitter page. You want return on your investment. You decide the engagement strategy needed which results in sales.

The engagement strategies generating the most return are marketing engagement and servicing engagement. Marketing engagement relies on brand management and awareness while connecting with customers. Servicing engagement places the focus on troubleshooting problems.

When customers present questions on social media, businesses must address concerns and offer a resolution. For example, customers receive answers to commonly asked questions on the company?Facebook page?verses traditional lines of communication.

There is power shift in social media. The power is no longer in the hands of the businesses, but the hands of the customer.?Customers?are no longer standing by waiting on the business to offer new products and services. Customers today want immediate results, brand transparency and validation that they are an integral part of the business process.

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